Can the little red dot stand shoulder to shoulder with the little black dress? A native islander and friends look at fashion (and such) in Singapore, and, occasionally, among her neighbours, and a little further afield

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When There Are No Cars, The Clothes Come Out

In what was a car park, two floors beneath ground level of the Sony Building in Ginza, a mini fashion emporium has opened. The subterranean space is unadorned, which is rather at odds with the mostly swishy stores above ground. This is one of Tokyo’s swankiest shopping districts. Is this why Hiroshi Fujiwara’s new retail concept is placed under the glitz?

In The Park.Ing Ginza, a two-level store, Mr Fujiwara is perhaps bringing street wear back to the street, or, in this case, underground concrete parking lot. This is Tokyo retail quite unlike others. In spirit and in the product mix, it brings to mind Dover Street Market Ginza, just three blocks away, but the similarity ends there. Park.Ing, by contrast, is closer to the term ‘market’, which is then similar to Comme des Garçons’s Good Design Shop (in Omotesando), a veritable general store much like a chap huay tiam (杂货店).

Movable industrial fixtures for The Park.Ing Ginza

Mr Fujiwara has given the space a jumble that is jaunty. That is to be expected since his approach, to many street style watchers (even those in his native Japan), is more with it than his former personal assistant and pal Nigo’s, now ensconced at Uniqlo (but still with the benefit of his own retail outlet, Store by Nigo in Laforet, Harajuku). Park.Ing is a showcase of Mr Fujiwara’s curatorial flare. You don’t only find Park.Ing-branded products; you’ll also find those that seem to share the retailer’s sense of sensible street wear that can be sensational.

In this regard, fans see Park.Ing as the next chapter of the POOL aoyama, Mr Fujiwara’s previous concept store, which closed shortly before the former opened in March this year. The POOL aoyama was a veritable headquarters of Japanese cool. Its collaborators—from Undercover to Uniform Experiment—speak as much about the founder’s eye as the clout he enjoys. The ‘Pool’ T-shirts—clearly cooler than an obvious ‘Cool’ and a clever jibe—was one of the most coveted garments during the store’s reign, and they still are.

Park.Ing’s Sony Walkman tribute in a form of a sweat top

For Park.Ing, Mr Fujiwara continues to work with people who shared his vision for Pool (is the initial P in both names deliberate?). He has kept the original creative team and continues to collaborate with Kiyonaga Hirofumi, the man behind SOPH and Uniform Experiment. In the already potent mix is Daisuke Gemma, the creative director at one of the hottest Japanese labels today, Sacai. This really means a steaming brew of products only the Japanese can bring together with such conviction and panache.

And there are the inevitable T-shirts, which remain deliciously anti-cool and borderline cultish. What is really interesting to us is his take on corporate/consumer-name branding, a trend started by Uniqlo and validated as haute by Vetements. In conjunction with Sony’s 70th anniversary (and the building’s 50th), Mr Fujiwara has created a couple of short-sleeved sweatshirts bearing the logo, right in the centre, of Sony’s nearly forgotten product range Walkman—in its original font to boot. There’s also another version featuring DAT, Sony’s much snubbed Digital Audio Tape (SOTD tech contributor Low Teck Mee was thrilled beyond words at the sight of them!). These may be lost on the Tidal generation, but for many there is something alluringly retro and snobbishly other-gen about them.

The white paper is as plain as a grocery bag

Therein is the appeal of Park.Ing. The store is stocked with street wear, but they aren’t predictably cute as A Bathing Ape, hardcore (and expensive) as Mastermind Japan, repetitive as Neighborhood, art-core as OriginalFake, or work wear-centred as Freak Store. Mr Fujiwara, 52, approaches fashion retail like the DJ that he is: sampling from only the most captivating sources. We can’t say for sure, but perhaps age has grounded him to output the practical without sacrificing wit and fun. It is really street wear for older customers (especially those who have shed their bond with business attire). And mostly with the important hint of exclusivity.

Mr Fujiwara is indeed the one to play pied piper to the matured crowd (more so since Ginza is no Shibuya). Once a Harajuku habitué who had worked in World’s End, the London store opened by his idols Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McClaren, he later embraced hip-hop and was considered the first to introduce rap music from the US to Japan, even teaching fellow DJs the turntablist technique of ‘scratching’. Fashion came later, in 1990, in the form of his own label Goodenough, thought to be the country’s first street wear label and a key player in the burgeoning street scene centred in Ura Harajuku, or the “back of Harajuku”.

The Park.Ing Ginza hang tag in the form of a car park ticket

T-shirts have always been a consistent part of his output since Goodenough (a couple were reprised for Park.Ing), and his aesthetic sense can be traced to Stüssy. Mr Fujiwara was a member of the International Stüssy Tribe—in fact, the group’s first Japanese member. The influence of his early days never really left him, and he has been able to take the visual cues of surf (as opposed to skate) culture and throw in dashes of hip-hop, pop, and whatever is capturing the imagination of cool-cat urbanites to generate approachable products that speak of the mood on the street.

Hiroshi Fujiwara is also very much connected to Fragment Design, a one-stop, multi-discipline studio he started in 2003 that does not really produce anything other than put out judicious collaborations. That runs the gamut from Louis Vuitton to Off-White to Nike to Levis (the Japan-only Fenom line): projects that strengthen his standing as street style’s Zeus, who also happens to play the guitar and sing.

The Park.Ing Ginza proves, just as the POOL aoyama before it did, that with the right mix, in an unexpected location, and awash with attitude, retail can be viable and, as they call it in Pokémon Go, a lure.